MIRABEATJ.* [SECOND NOTICE.] GABRIEL HONORE, Comte de Mirabeau, came stormily
into the world at Bignon, his father's favourite home, in March, 1749, tongue-tied and with a twisted foot, but vigorous and with two teeth already formed. He was the fifth child, but the eldest living son, of the Marquis Victor, "Friend of Men," of whom we have written in a "previous article. On his father's side, he should have inherited beauty, extravagant yet noble aims, and a life of mingled passion and austerity, an exces- sive cult of honour and devouring family ambition, an almost incredible power of work, and fecundity of ideas. From his mother he probably took the disordered conscience which corrupted all his gifts, and perhaps the seduction of manner —the "terrible gift of familiarity," as his father called it—and the reckless dishonesty in money matters, which together both made and marred his career. "Ugly as Satan," he resembled his Vassan grandfather at his birth, and small-pox at three years old left him scarred as by fire. His father did not approve of familiar intercourse between parents and their children ; but the Friend was also by profession the Educator of Men, and an excellent tutor crammed the boy's brain till there seemed nothing more to teach. Not even branding with hot iron as a punishment could give him a moral sense; but no
• Vie do Mirabeau. Par A. Hezieras, de l'Acadtimie Francaisc. Paris: Hachette. 1E92. youth was ever more observant, and the lessons he learned of country life stood him in good stead in 1789. Most of our readers are probably acquainted with the incidents of his youth, but it is difficult to write of him at all without reference to them, and his father deserves to be acquitted of excessive severity. His four imprisonments, of which the last at Vincennes was the only severe punishment, were, as a fact, rests during which Mirabeau recruited his vast powers for study and thought. After the first, he showed brilliant military qualities daring a campaign in Corsica, and later he employed himself in writing, with a gift of style and array of knowledge that dazzled his father even when most displeased. "If he is worse than Nero," writes his. uncle, the Bailli, "he will surpass Marcus Aurelius." Hardly, however, in stoical calm. It has been said that only men of strong passions attain greatness : those of Mirabeau might have furnished a dozen Hercules. He had shrewd sagacity, and even wisdom to see what was expedient for others ; but it does. not appear that conceptions of right or wrong as regarded his own conduct affected him. The honesty of his ancestors did not exist for him, still less that higher honesty, honour. His power of memory and of skill in using his store of know- ledge for the persuasion of men, were perhaps never sur- passed. His experience of the defeats of life rather than its. victories, his immense disappointments and disillusions, taught him to express the passionate impatience of a people equally embittered by disaster. For the sins of the Revolution, as for Mirabeau's, large allowance must be made. A son who, when he took his father's part, received a pistol-shot from his mother—who, when under her influence attacking his father, is imprisoned by lettre de cachet—is hardly likely to. make a happy home or a stable family for himself ; but in his tormented youth there were times when he used his judgment well. He lived in the full glow of physiocratic economy at Bignon for two years, and was the leading spirit in an attempt of the Marquis to reconstitute prad'hommerie in a local conseil de- conciliation. As a youth, he visited Versailles, and made his way through every door and button-holed the Prime Minister with Royal condescension. From thence he was sent to. Mirabeau to quell the mutinous spirit of the vassals, who. would not let even their dogs be hampered by restraints. At Aix he heard of an heiress, Mademoiselle de Marignane, well-born, and possessed of £20,000; and in four months he had fascinated her family and friends, and distanced his rivals,. by very questionable frauds. The Marquis lent the married pair Mirabeau to live in, but within fifteen months they were pawning the sumptuous furniture which the bride- groom had ordered in ; he was found to owe £9,000, and was summarily interned at Mirabeau. Lettres de cachet were but withes to this Samson. To please his sister and ally, the Marquise de Cabris, he broke bounds, the better to beat an elderly gossip who had spoken the truth about her. Always his evil genius, Madame de Cabris was never more so than in this critical year of his life. Sent to the prison of If, he was thence transferred to Jona, near Pontarlier, where lived the Sophie, Marquise de Monnier, immortalised by the Lettres de Vincennes. He did not see his wife again until his political exigencies required the decency of an attempted but futile reconciliation. No episode of his disorderly life is better known than his passionate attachment to Sophie ; but, besides the well-known corre- spondence which passed through the hands of the police during his imprisonment at Vincennes, Messrs. de Lomenie have had access to more private and less full-dressed letters. The most romantic of such intrigues has its mean side ; and the licentious coarseness of Mirabeau's relations with the fat and rather vulgar grand.e dame of Pontarlier, though re- lated in burning words, and lasting till circumstances per- force put an end to it, is certainly not his best title to immor- tality.
To escape with her across the frontier, and hide himself in Amsterdam, was in the eyes of the French world an almost irretrievable crime, punishable by death. Sophie had stolen Some of her husband's money ; but though Mirabeau flung manuscript after manuscript to the Amsterdam publishers, he was soon enmeshed in poverty and debt, and the lovers *ere easily arrested under an order of extradition in 1777,— he to be at last really imprisoned in the mediscval dungeon of Vincennes; she, in a house of correction at Besancon, to have her head shaved, and to wear the dress of the other
women detained there. And so Mirabeau, at twenty-eight, was at last bitted. After six months, however, he was allowed to correspond with Sophie. One or more letters a day enabled him to air his views on many subjects for the benefit of the police officer through whose bands his notes passed. His brain was in a state of ebullition, and after forty-two months at Vincennes, he had produced a mass of writing on subjects as diverse as, for instance, Tibnllus and inoculation. One work remained among his best,—his essay on "State Prisons." His health broke down ; but his father at least affected severity. "Twill seal up the madman as bees seal up a snail which has found its way into their hive," he exclaimed.
But Mirabean's only legitimate child died, and the Marquis determined on general reconciliation. Complicated negotia- tions followed, and an almost incredible mass of words had to be eaten by all concerned. The chief culprit left Vincennes in 1781 "with the air of a Francois I." It was the year when the Marquis was finally defeated by his wife, and, much broken, he again received his prodigal son. Then followed one last farewell to Sophie, at the convent where she lodged. After that, for her only such sad, incessant writing, that her sight gave way. Two years later her husband died, and she would have married again, and that respectably, but her betrothed died, and, weary of so many disasters, she killed herself by charcoal-fumes. The news came to Mirabeau at a sitting of the Constituent Assembly in September, 1789. He showed little emotion. Meantime, his wife, who was a leader of Aix society, refused to re-enter his life of storms. He went to law with her, and pleaded his own cause with such elo- quence, tact, and fine sense of the circumstances, with such knowledge of hearts, that the Judges delayed judgment for a day, so greatly had he moved them and all his hearers. The judgment was against him ; but the echoes of his eloquence were useful to him when he was elected Deputy for Aix in after- years. It was the bitterest moment of his career; but the never- pausing man was but the more determined to master fortune. It was then that Madame de Nehra devoted herself to him, and her resolute sacrifices, illegitimate as they were, her efforts for his redemption, are his best titles to forgiveness in his relations with women. All careers seemed closed to him but that of a pamphleteer, and he was ready for any employment of his pen, though, as even La Fayette afterwards said, "Mirabeau required pay for his work, but never sold his opinions." He visited his school-friends, Gilbert and Hugh Elliot, in England, and there were hopes through their influence of finding service in a Northern Court. He was too wild a leviathan for an English home; his untidiness and gallantries frightened the Elliot ladies; but be saw the leaders of English parties, and appreciated the individual liberty secured to Englishmen, even when he was brought before a Magistrate for caning his valet He returned to Paris in a fever of journalism, but the innu- merable publications which blazed like rockets from his work- shop could not keep him out of debt. He would not have been his father's son if he had not fought in the raging battle of finance which was then all-important to bankrupt France. His attacks on Necker's system told ; he could not hence- forward be overlooked. He had influential friends, among whom was Talleyrand, and he was sent on a roving mission to Berlin. He conversed with the great Frederick, and after his death, noted the stagnant discontent which followed such strenuous Royalty. Nothing is more noteworthy in Mirabeau than his personal knowledge of men, from the meanest to the greatest. His power of assimilating information enabled him, after six months in Berlin, to produce his exhaustive work on the Prussian Monarchy, and in miserable contrast, those secret Memoirs which scandalised even Paris, and cost him any consideration he had regained. But soon came the up- heaval of all society. "Mr. Hurricane," as his father called him while still a youth, had wider space for his forces. At last, practical politics and the leadership, not of theories but of men, was within his reach. He was patrician at heart ; he did battle for the people with his unequalled strength, physical and intellectual, yet his sagacity led him to support authority, and at one crisis to propose martial law, even while a desperate resolve to seize and hold power induced him to flatter the mob and preside over the Jacobin Club. He had not his father's re- spect for religion, yet he would" apply it in the science of govern- ment with the same profit as algebra is applied in geometry." In spite of "the fatal disease of Ministers, which makes them
refuse to-day what they must grant to-morrow," he would have helped Government in 1788 as he helped the Court in '90. But he thirsted for money as a drunkard thirsts for liquor : he would not betray his patriotism, which was conservative, but he must live by it. Before he went to Provence for election to the States-General, he applied for Government money to enable him to bear his expenses : but after his Berlin letters, the Ministers feared to trust him.
The condition of Provence was ripe for his election. Insur- rection had broken out in more than forty communes at once. Taxes had been levied in them almost entirely on flour. The severe winter had been more disastrous than elsewhere to the crops, and the taxers of the people's breadstuffs seemed to the sufferers to be responsible for their supply. Before any lessons from Paris, spontaneous anarchy existed in every fief, and Mirabeau appeared the only power to direct the storm.
Perhaps he was never greater than when he controlled by his mere presence the mobs of Aix and Marseilles. What was it to him that because of a trifling informality the nobles refused his candidature ? He turned to the tiers itat, and was returned for the capital of his province as a nominal clothier by an immense majority. He met averted looks from the King and the Ministry in Paris ; yet one of his first actions was to petition Louis that he would listen to a common deliberation of the three orders on the manner of their voting. Had the King attended to it, the oath of the Tennis Court might have been averted. To gain a hearing, Mirabean founded a journal, instantly suppressed; yet he won the battle of the Press by publishing two letters a week addressed to his constituents. He strenuously denied the right of the tiers itat to call itself the National Assembly; he left the House on the night when privilege was abolished ; in a dozen ways he showed a sagacity little appreciated at the time. His voice, often heard, was of little weight, until passion and vanity made him half-scornfully accept the leadership of lesser but more dan- gerous men in the race towards revolution. He trusted that the first heat of it would spend itself, and that he could direct, if not arrest it, and no doubt he loved to be king of the market-place not less than to be chief adviser of the Monarchy ; while to be heard at all he had to be in the first instance popular. And his voice was not that leonine " brool " of which Carlyle writes in his fantastic sketch, but silver-clear. Of his eloquence perhaps too much has been made. He swayed men by extraordinary knowledge of them, and his personal force was not less than his familiar charm : it was said of it that it was not the communication of thought, but as of a body swaying another body. He employed little gesture. Until near the end of his career, he spoke from manuscript, and seldom debated any point. "Gloomy, motionless, and ugly he remained," writes Chateanbriand, who saw him at the Jacobins, "like Milton's chaos, during the frightful disorder of a sitting." Yet he had the strongest instincts of national order. In vain he placed on the table of the Assembly Hominy's Rules of the House of Commons; in vain he suggested that the English Riot Act should be read, emphasised by a red flag, whenever there were sparks of Jacquerie. He was appointed Reporter on the Declaration of the Rights of Men, but he had no taste for such futilities. The right government of men was his aim, and his report was discarded. Even in "The Week of Plots," as that week was called, which included October 5th and 6th, 1789, there seems no reason to doubt Mirabean's attachment to the Monarchy be it only fitly represented, by the Duke of Orleans or Monsieur or the Queen. His correspondence with his Belgian confidant, Count de la Marck, best reveals the ripened principles of his last six months. In 1789, he had exclaimed, on the occasion of some shiftiness in that "oiled billiard-ball," Louis XVI. : "So Kings are led to the scaffold." If he thwarted La Fayette, it was for good reasons other than rivalry. If he desired to be maire of Paris, it was that he might get the secrets of that Sphinx, as he called the city, and neutralise her poison. He was always lavish, and it is said that seven millions of francs were spent in maintaining him and his agents of defence against the rising tide of crime and violence, and in vain ! Louis would do nothing in time. He refused retreat on Rouen; and, fortunately, Mirabeau did _ not live to see the result of the Varennes flight. No doubt Mirabeau often spoke against the King's wishes. He recom- mended, for instance, a salaried and Galilean clergy. His hi-weekly reports to the Court were not always in harmony
with that eloquence which intoxicated itself in its obedience to the gust of the hour. As his father long since had said of him, he was an "assemblage of contraries," and less than any man can he be judged by isolated actions. Macaulay has named him Wilkes-Chatham: let us chiefly think of Chatham. He made proof of the highest citizenship by his censure when France, isolating herself in contemplation of the Rights of Man, neglected treaties and the law of nations. He was the first to claim those rights for Jews and Quakers. He had long led the anti-slavery agitation, and his last efforts were in the cause of popular education. But he "erred by the base," as his father had said, and all the splendour of the temple was flawed.
He died at forty-two, after five days' illness, of rheumatic pericarditis. To the last careful of renown, he conversed calmly of philosophy with his friends. In the court outside, his mother waited, all unconscious of her share in every error of his life, as she was of the pathetic struggle in him of virtues as vast as were his vices, but afraid to intrude on him. No man was more adored by his friends of every class, or more beloved of women. No man had a harder struggle against circumstance ; and this may perhaps be a better title to our sympathy than his dominance in a monstrous time.
Previous page
